NEW YORK — At the end of Nolan McLean’s freshman year at Oklahoma State, he and baseball coach Josh Holliday had to have the talk.
McLean had chosen to play for the Cowboys in large part because they’d permitted him to play both football and baseball. However, after redshirting on the gridiron, his promise on the diamond was becoming too large to ignore.
“I don’t know if you’re going to play in the NFL,” Holliday told McLean, “but I am certain you can play in the major leagues.”
McLean dropped football, eventually dropped hitting, and is set to complete a remarkable ascent through the New York Mets’ minor-league system by making his big-league debut as a starting pitcher Saturday against the Seattle Mariners. The Mets are calling up the 24-year-old, who’s posted a 2.78 ERA in 16 games (13 starts) for Triple-A Syracuse this season.
Nolan McLean juggled football and baseball duties at Oklahoma State, which kept his innings total in check. (Garett Fisbeck / Associated Press)
To those who have seen McLean play since he was an eighth-grade phenom just outside Raleigh, N.C., this development is not a surprise. Nolan McLean was going to be a professional athlete in some capacity. But to make his debut less than a month after his 24th birthday, barely two years after his first professional start, is startling.
“You draft players and sometimes they get to 70 percent or 80 percent or 90 percent of their potential,” said Mets vice president of player evaluation Tommy Tanous. “This guy is getting to 100 percent of his potential.”
That potential is grounded in McLean’s athleticism. Look, everyone who makes the major leagues is a terrific athlete, but even within that group, McLean stands out.
“This guy can play virtually any position on the field,” Holliday said. “He’s going to pitch in the major leagues soon. He plays an elite-level third base. He plays high-level outfield. Some people thought he was a future major-league catcher at a young age. … If he kept playing football, he probably would have been the starting quarterback here.”
A two-way baseball player and football star? Forget Ohtani. More like Bo-tani.
“Very rarely do you get a guy throwing the velocity he throws at and probably giving him a grade of 70 or 80 (on the 20-to-80 scouting scale) on the power as a hitter,” Tanous said while describing McLean’s prep days. “He was a true two-way prospect in high school.”
McLean’s development since high school has hinged on the narrowing of his focus. At Oklahoma State, he started as a two-way baseball player with football in the fall, which especially limited his pitching.
“We tried to keep the throwing at a minimum because of the combination of football throws and baseball throws,” Holliday said. “There needed to be a real cautious approach to the arm.”
“We would joke, we heard from our scouting group, really the only regimented work he had as a pitcher in college was throwing flat-grounds from third base to first base to warm up to come into the game,” said Eric Jagers, Mets vice president of pitching.
That’s why McLean’s initial pitching workload was so small: a pair of one-inning appearances as a freshman, and relief outings for the large majority of his college career.
He dropped football after his freshman year and opened eyes on the mound as a junior, when he posted a 3.30 ERA in 30 innings. In the Mets front office, national supervisor Chris Hervey and manager of baseball analytics Jack Bredeson championed McLean’s potential, and New York took him in the third round. (McLean had been drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in the third round a year earlier but didn’t come to terms, in part because of a disagreement over his medicals.)
“He was a relatively good strike-thrower for a guy who hadn’t spent much time on the mound,” Tanous said. “We felt like there were components to his athleticism that would give him a chance (to start) — his repeatability to his delivery. And he had two present pitches, so could we develop another?”
While the Mets initially permitted McLean to hit — and he showed off his extraordinary power — a strikeout rate over 50 percent led to the end of the experiment last June. Since then, he’s been a starter only.
“Pitching came more natural to Nolan, and he had to spend more time trying to develop as a hitter, and that took a lot of his focus,” Jagers said. “He just was able to put more eggs in the pitching basket and simply spend more time on his pitching craft.”
“You take that competitive elite talent and spread it out over multiple challenges, and he was awfully good at a lot of things — center field, third base, hitting, pitching, closing. Anything he did, he did really well,” Holliday said. “But when he’s allowed now to just take on this art form of being a starting pitcher and put all of his focus into that, you’re seeing the results.”
What separates McLean as a pitcher isn’t velocity; it’s spin.
“The few times we saw him throw bullpens, we were amazed at the gift,” Holliday said. “He could spin a baseball in an absolutely unique fashion.”
“He does things with the baseball,” said Jagers, “that others cannot.”
Jagers pointed to McLean’s last outing in Triple A on Sunday, when he threw a curveball with 3,511 revolutions per minute. No major-league pitcher this season has thrown a pitch with more spin.
“He can really do some things, with hand manipulation, that can make the ball do crazy stuff,” Mets pitching coach Jeremy Hefner said.
So much of pitching can be taught these days. You can add velocity, you can revamp a repertoire, you can refine your mechanics. But spin at that elite level?
“It’s just God-given,” said Hefner. “You can do some athletic throwing to promote it, but it’s a skill you’re born with.”
“Nolan could throw a breaking ball. Now, when you see his strikeouts, his breaking balls look like they’re unhittable,” Holliday said. “I knew it was there, and to his credit, the more he pitched, the more it showed up.”
“You might think it’s a good idea to have X or Y pitch, but you can’t get there,” said Jagers. “There’s not a whole lot he can’t get to.”
That has allowed McLean to transform the curveball he had entering Oklahoma State into a curveball, a slider, a sweeper and a cutter — all serving different purposes, all viable pitches for him now.
That’s another facet of that athleticism.
“There are a lot of good athletes. He’s a tremendous athlete, and what sets him apart is his aptitude — his ability to make adjustments,” Tanous said. “When he’s shown something, his ability to master it is really impressive.”
For a pitcher with this little in-game experience — he’ll debut with about a season’s worth fewer innings than the notoriously inexperienced Jacob deGrom did with the Mets in 2014 — McLean has shown an advanced feel for the art of pitching.
“He’s done a really good job seeing what hitters are keying on, what pitches they’re sitting on, what’s working well or not working well,” Jagers said. “He’s got a steady hand and can take in information and coaching during a game to make adjustments. That’s a testament to his work ethic and the homework that he does. He’s just got an ability to handle that stuff, even in the heat of the battle.”
And that points to what might be the most important element here for McLean. He is arriving with the Mets mired in a months-long torpor, their rotation a millstone making each night an adventure. In reality, there’s no soft landing for a prospect making his major-league debut; they’re all hard. However, McLean’s challenge in coming up now — to help mend a rotation and a season gone sideways — is steeper than most.
“He just needs to do the same things that he’s been doing,” Hefner said. “How he prepared in the minor leagues is how he’ll prepare here. How he used his pitches in the minor leagues is how he’ll use his pitches here. They’ve done an incredible job preparing him for this moment, and we’re not going to get in the way.”
Oh, and it’s in New York, of all places.
“One thing’s for sure: He’s not timid,” Holliday said. “He’s always been a guy that takes on challenges. He’s not going to tiptoe around. He’ll go out there and take what he’s learned, take the ball and he’ll get after it and go for it, and he won’t hold back.
“If anything, he’ll elevate because of it.”
(Top photo of Nolan McLean from spring training: Jim Rassol / USA Today Network via Imagn Images)